School Board Ruling
On 12 March 1974, the English Language Arts Textbook Committee of Kanawha County, West Virginia recommended 325 books and textbooks to the school board for use in Kanawha elementary schools. Among these were titles such as America Reads and Language of Man. These textbooks were part of a new state curriculum that included for the first time the concepts of multiculturalism and egalitarianism in textbook writing. Most school board members saw no reason to question the state's decision, but board member Alice Moore was concerned by the term dialectology, which implied the teaching of Appalachian English and African American Vernacular English as "equally correct" dialects, when she believed they could impede access to higher education and careers. The school board moved to review the books before sending them to schools. Upon receiving the review copies, Moore was disturbed by a quote from the Autobiography of Malcolm X in which he referred to Christians as "brainwashed"; she requested and received all 300 textbooks, and claims she found quotes from Allen Ginsberg, Sigmund Freud's Oedipus complex, and convicted Black Panthers such as Eldridge Cleaver and George Jackson.
Moore telephoned Mel Gabler, a textbook evaluator who ran Educational Research Analysts, a non-profit organization in Texas. Gabler in return sent pamphlets and outlines of some of the ways in which the content of the books allegedly conflicted with Christian values, moral uprightness, and patriotism. Moore, the wife of a fundamentalist minister, reported her concerns to the board and local newspapers. On 23 May, Moore came to the school board meeting and charged that the textbooks were "filthy, disgusting trash, unpatriotic and unduly favoring blacks". She argued that the textbooks taught children to disrespect the beliefs of their parents and taught a brand of relativism that did not belong in West Virginia. She generated much publicity for her cause and won the support of the local Parent-Teacher Association and the Magic Valley Mother's Club. However, the West Virginia Council of Churches supported the books.
On 27 June the school board met again, with over 1,000 local residents observing, and voted to approve the books after a three-hour debate over the merits of teaching a liberal curriculum. This was met with much consternation from conservative groups. Reverend Marvin Horan called for a boycott of all public schools. Fliers were distributed around the county which purported to demonstrate the lewdness of the books, but were actually quotations from completely different books like Sexual Politics that were not part of the curriculum. When parents could not find these passages in their children's own textbooks, they accused the teachers of hiding the real books from them.
Read more about this topic: Kanawha County Textbook Controversy
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